Welcome to the New Age
by whimsycality
Summary: "Whatever happens tomorrow you must promise me one thing. That you will stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man." Steve wakes up and tries to figure out what being a good man means in this new and complicated world, and what he's supposed to fight for now that his war is over.


**A/N: **So I was re-reading one of my Roswell fics inspired by Radioactive (Imagine Dragons) and realized suddenly that it was an excellent song to represent Cap's POV on waking up in the future. Thus this fic was born. It honestly didn't end how I was expecting it to, but Steve surprised even me, and I'm hoping to write more, set post-Avengers, so we'll see if the muse cooperates.

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~x~

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New York was never the cleanest of cities but the air is thicker now, layered with smells and tastes that didn't exist when he last walked the streets. The colors are sharper, brighter, the lights like glowing jewels, especially at night when they flow and dance in dizzying patterns. It makes the darkness, the grit, all the more apparent for the contrast, and it breaks something inside of him to see homeless vets sleeping in alleys between stores that sell a thousand useless trinkets, each costing more than he'd made in his entire life as a Brooklyn street rat.

He's no stranger to the stark difference between poverty and wealth. He grew up during the Depression and later fought in the mud and dirt in Europe while Howard Stark waltzed in and out of his life with impossible, expensive presents, seeming to have no care for rations or rules or anything he didn't want to do.

Howard would have loved this new world. He thinks Bucky might have too, but then, Bucky was right there with him, orphans scraping by on little cash and less food, so maybe he would have been as torn between sickened, helpless fury, and dazed, overwhelmed awe as Steve is.

They won the war. This is one of the first things they told him when he woke up, hoping, maybe, to cheer up the National Icon who had felt so stiffly out of place. They didn't tell him how, but he's nothing if not stubborn and adaptable and he knows how to research, even if the knowledge he needs is stored electronically in a staggeringly complex juggernaut known as the internet.

The first time he sees the words atomic bomb he doesn't understand them. When he matches those words with definitions and casualty numbers and images, he vomits in the shiny white toilet in his shiny new apartment and wishes he'd never woken up.

All he can see is Hydra and Schmidt and Bucky laying on that table and the wrenching disbelief he felt the first time he saw someone disappear in a blast of blue light. During the war he had never doubted that they were on the right side, never doubted that men like Schmidt and Hitler, who could kill millions of people in the name of superiority, were evil and needed to be put down like rabid dogs.

Looking at pictures of silhouettes of ash on a wall in Hiroshima he wonders if a right side even exists anymore.

There have been more wars since then, wars for reasons far less cut and dried than stopping a megalomaniac trying to reshape the world. They're still _in_ a war, a war that puts thousands of young men and women on the streets with injuries and mental issues and little to no support because as far as he can tell, no one even _agrees_ with the war but they're still fighting it anyway and what does that even mean?

There are beautiful things too, things he is glad of. Infant mortality is so low he can hardly comprehend it; most of the ailments he suffered from pre-serum now have cures or at least better treatments; and equality, for women and men of all races and inclinations, is far closer to being achieved than any of them could have ever dreamed of in the forties.

He remembers the arguments from the higher ups over allowing Gabe into the unit, over allowing Captain America to be seen leading an integrated group of soldiers. He remembers the silent _want_ that would wash over him sometimes when he watched Bucky laugh, a want he never dared to put a name to. He remembers Peggy decking that idiot their first day in basic and he thinks she must have been proud to live long enough to see 'beautiful dames' allowed to fight and die for their country if they wanted to.

If there's one thing war taught him, it's that everyone bleeds and dies the same. If everyone's the same at the end, why can't they be treated the same on the way there?

He also knows that Captain America expressing such a sentiment would horrify half the nation, who seem so desperate to cling to traditional values that he thinks the meaning of the word values has been forgotten.

He's always hated bullies; bullies with news stations and protest signs aren't that much different from bullies picking on the little guy who never took no for an answer.

He feels angry and restless and trapped in a way that has nothing to do with SHIELD monitoring his every move. He _aches_ with missing people who lived and died while he slept, and wonders sometimes if some necessary part of him didn't get left in the ice, permanently frozen.

After the serum, he never needed much sleep, about half as much as normal man, and now, now he maybe gets half of that again, too afraid of waking up only to find it all changed again, maybe to something worse.

He puts on the clothes SHIELD provided, plaids and khakis he suspects are supposed to make him feel more comfortable, despite the fact that half the materials in them didn't exist seventy years ago. He feels both naked and relieved without his uniform, either of them, and feels a distant sort of dread at the idea of wearing the colors of the flag again.

To his men he was always Steve, or Captain Rogers, but once he got off that damned stage, he never felt ashamed of also being Captain America. Now he's not so sure he wants to take up the mantle of his country again. And then he does feel shame, because to him it was never about politics, it was about _people_. No matter what has changed, for better or worse, he would still be proud to fight and die for the people in this country, even if every other word he hears on the streets of New York baffles or dismays him.

So he watches them, the people of his country. He listens and he learns and he draws, because he's always processed better when he can put pencil to paper and create the things he feels.

They aren't that different than they were. Louder, perhaps, but then he remembers the butcher who'd give him scraps of meat while cheerfully cursing at the boy mopping blood off the floor, and Mrs. King, whose voice could be heard two blocks down, and the Union boys, marching and chanting, and thinks perhaps they aren't louder, there's just more of them, and they sound different, so it isn't the familiar white noise it was when Brooklyn was home.

They're more profane, more abrupt, but between the orphanage and the war, he's heard his share of both. It amuses him every time the SHIELD agents who're supposed to be updating him on the world seem surprised when he doesn't blush or get offended when someone curses in his presence or makes a clearly ribald statement. Brooklyn was Brooklyn, even back then, and he still hasn't heard anything as filthy as some of the stories and jokes the Commandos would come up with during the long stretches between towns with willing women.

It's like they think his status as Captain America means his soldiers stopped being soldiers when he was around. They were at _war_, risking death every day, so yes, he has heard the word fuck before, even used it a time or two. And while he still prefers not to discuss sex in the same casual way he'll talk about baseball, it's not like he's going to have a heart attack if he overhears a girl in Starbucks muttering dirty things into her cell phone while he waits for his coffee. He's far more likely to have a heart attack over the price of the coffee, all things considered.

They watch him like he's going to break and he thinks they worry about all the wrong things. The clothes, the words, the technology, he can adapt to them. He will never understand or appreciate Reality TV, or much of TV at all, but it doesn't bother him, and the things they've done with movies make the ticket prices worth it.

They talk about the little things, expect him to have a crisis over seeing a girl in lingerie on a billboard, and fail to realize that he spent months with half naked showgirls while selling bonds for the war.

It is the big things they ignore. They don't show him the news, only give him snippets of historical facts between the War and now, and seem to forget that his skills at strategy and tactics aren't limited to the battlefield.

It isn't the Pride parade that makes his stomach churn, it's the angry faces in the streets who watch and mutter epithets with new sounds and old meanings. It isn't the idea of a computer, or even a computer that can fit in his pocket and also call someone in London, that he can't process - it's the awareness of how much easier it is to kill someone across the world with the press of a button and a drone that doesn't risk your own life but is allowed to kill an 'acceptable' amount of civilians.

It isn't going from a war to peace that wakes him with nightmares, it's the fear that the war _didn't change anything_.

He's always needed a cause. Scrawny Steve only got in so many fights because he couldn't not stand up for himself or anyone else in need of protection and he didn't know how to not fight for what he thought people deserved.

The war, for all its horror and ugliness, was the first time he felt completely comfortable in his own skin, in a way that had nothing to do with the serum. He was making a difference, in a real and tangible way he could see in tacks on a map and the smile on Bucky's face when it sank in that he was _alive_ and not still strapped to Zola's table.

But now, in this disorienting future that he's not sure has a place for him, he doesn't have anything to fight for. He doesn't have anything to _do_, and that, he knows, is what SHIELD should be making contingency plans for. Because Steve isn't good at inaction, he's not good at being told to stay quietly in his corner until he's needed, and every day he sees more causes that need fighting for.

But these aren't the kind of fights where fists and a shield will make a difference and he's never been comfortable using his words or his smile to sway people.

He can learn though, if he has to, and he knows how powerful an image, a symbol, can be.

He just needs a plan, and, maybe, someone to have his back, just like Bucky and the Commandos all those years ago.

Avengers Initiative, Fury tells him weeks later, and Steve hides a smile that SHIELD will misunderstand.

That might work.


End file.
